The Wife and the Widow

by Christian White

  A gust of frigid wind sent her hurrying up the driveway and into the garage, the clothes bundled under one arm.

  She yanked the pull-string light switch in the dark, and, after a satisfying click, a bank of fluorescent lights blinked on overhead. The garage was a double and should have been big enough to fit two cars and then some, but like most garages theirs served as a miscellaneous overflow. There were tall, wavering stacks of packing boxes, plastic tubs, empty pots, resistance bands with little resistance left in them, a weightlifting station shrouded in cobwebs, a ride-on mower that Ray got cheap at a garage sale three years ago before finding – surprise, surprise – that it didn’t run.

  A narrow path had been carved through the junk, along with a wide rectangular space for Ray’s work truck, a mud-splattered four-door utility. The only other space cut out of all this stuff was for Abby’s workbench, a hulking, paint-stained thing they’d picked up from an antique store on the mainland. Somewhere beyond it was the box of old clothes they’d been meaning to drop at the Salvos for months.

  Abby ran her fingers along the wooden benchtop on her way past. She’d have to make time to get out here again soon – maybe some quiet evening, or on the weekend, when the kids were out and Ray was watching the footy. It was on this workbench that, through trial and error and many a trip to Belport Library in search of how-to guides, Abby had become a halfway-confident amateur taxidermist. Arranged neatly on the bench or mounted on the pegboard behind it were a dark-green apron, scalpel blades, surgical gloves, insect pins, fishing line, rubber bands, playing cards (for ‘carding’ ears), borax laundry soap (for curing hides), critter clay, modelling tools, tongue depressors, pliers, super glue, a staple gun and two dozen sets of glass eyes in various sizes.

  Underfoot was a humming bar fridge containing a few bottles of water, a six-pack of beer and Abby’s next specimen: a possum that Susi Lenten had found dead beneath the powerlines outside her house. Alongside the fridge was a plastic tub packed with various chemicals including tanning solutions, pickling agents, luminol and bactericide.

  So far, all she’d stuffed were mice, rats and birds. They lived on various shelves around the house, sagging and bulging in all the wrong places. But that just seemed to make them almost human-like in their imperfection. As a rule, she only used animals that died of natural causes, so it was not uncommon for people around the island to call her up any time they found a dead creature on the road, in their garden, or on the beach. They’d say things like, ‘I’ve got a magpie up here on my balcony – poor little fella flew right into the screen door; hasn’t been dead long but you might wanna hurry cause the flies won’t be far off,’ and ‘You need to get this bush rat out of my freezer before Shivaun divorces me – she needs the space and I know better than to argue with a woman as pregnant as she is.’

  Abby couldn’t say why she enjoyed taxidermy, and didn’t care to question it too much. It was as messy as it was meditative, and she didn’t make any money out of it. The few animals she didn’t keep for herself she gave away as gifts, usually to people who accepted them through gritted teeth and with wide, terrified eyes. But there was something darkly wonderful about the craft that kept pulling her back. Death imitating life, she thought, and liked the way that sounded.

  She finally found the Salvos box on a dusty shelf, sandwiched between a sandy old picnic blanket that smelled like wet dog (which was strange, because they didn’t have a dog) and a milk crate full of old car parts. She dumped Ray’s trousers, shirt and boots into the box, turned off the light, and went inside.

  Home was a small weatherboard beach house full of things that didn’t work: sticky windows, rattling pipes, and electrical outlets that buzzed dangerously whenever something was plugged in. They were saving up to make renovations but wouldn’t have nearly enough until next season, or maybe the one after that.

  Abby was in no hurry to fix it. She loved every crack and quirk: the groaning floorboards, the constant pop of settling wood, the loose screen door that banged endlessly in the middle of the night. She was not a complainer, not some woman living a quiet life of desperation, fearing middle age as it bore down on her. No, that wasn’t Abby. She was content. She was happy.

  She knew her fifteen-year-old was in the kitchen before she entered; the heavy scent of Lynx body spray gave him away. Eddie was standing at the counter wearing a blue apron and chopping garlic. He’d be a good-looking man one day, in the far-off, distant future, but right now he was passing awkwardly through the Ichabod Crane phase of puberty: gangly limbs and an archipelago of violent red acne across his forehead.

  He didn’t look up when Abby entered.

  ‘What’s for dinner?’ she asked him.

  ‘Vegetarian gourmet pizza,’ he said in a dry tone, the same he might use to deliver a lecture on the history of the ladder.

  ‘Sounds fancy.’

  He shrugged and skilfully cleaned the blade of the knife on his apron. His eyes narrowed and he began furiously slicing mushrooms, as if he were punishing them for something.

  ‘Take it easy,’ Abby told him. ‘It won’t be vegetarian if you lose a finger in there, you know.’

  He said nothing. He was in a mood, Abby guessed. She fetched a beer from the fridge as her husband wandered in from the bathroom, smelling fresh, his hair slick and wet from his after-work shower.

  ‘Beer?’ Abby offered.

  ‘Water’s fine.’

  ‘Water instead of beer.’ She screwed up her mouth at the words. ‘I used to know you.’

  Abby was a runner but balanced out her fitness with an unhealthy amount of fat, sugar and booze. Ray, on the other hand, was on some kind of health kick. No, that was understating it. Ray was on a brutal fitness regime that bordered on self-harm.

  He’d never been close to overweight. Beefy, maybe, but he carried it well. But lately, deep contours and ridges had formed on his chest. The skin around his neck clung tight to a jaw she’d never realised was square, and new muscles filled out the sleeves of his T-shirt. This steady hardening and tightening of his body reminded Abby of an archaeological dig site. She imagined brushing away the sand, dirt and fat until only a skeleton remained.

  ‘Sounds like a midlife crisis to me,’ Abby said. She filled a glass from the tap and handed it to him. ‘Pretty soon you’re going to start tucking your shirts in.’

  He sighed, which made Abby think she might be riding him too hard. She slid her arms around her husband. She felt Ray, but at the same time she felt the anti-Ray. Ray with the crusts cut off.

  It occurred to her that it had been a while since they last had sex, and longer still since she’d seen Ray fully naked. The last half-dozen times they’d made love was in the dark with the lights off, after a box of red wine.

  She felt Ray’s fingers lightly touch her love handles, then pulled away.

  Other, less secure women might have felt nervous if their partners started systematically changing everything about themselves, but a wicked, guilty part of Abby knew this fitness stuff was just another phase. Last year, he started taking night classes on the mainland and declared himself an entrepreneur. The year before it was all about franchises. Next month he’d probably start writing that bestselling novel he’d been talking about since they’d met; maybe after some piano lessons.

  All she had to do was wait it out. She hated thinking that, but that didn’t stop it from being true. What Ray didn’t realise – or refused to – was that it would take more than a few hours on the treadmill or a semester of business classes to get off this rock. Belport Island had a way of drawing you in, holding you down and whispering, I’m never gonna let you go, baby. Abby had learned a long time ago that it was easier to lean into it than to struggle against it.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with trying to improve your life,’ came a voice from the hall, in a tone like strawberry shortcake laced with rat poison. Lori entered, clomping loudly in Doc Martens, wearing an oversized Nirvana T-shirt and a face as long as a wet weekend.


  ‘By the way, Eddie forgot to bring in the firewood and now it’s soaked.’

  ‘Are your arms painted on?’ Eddie asked.

  Lori rolled her eyes. She was a beautiful girl, with straight dark hair and features that seemed hand-picked by a team of experts to match the shape of her face. Somewhere around her thirteenth birthday she had turned calculative and secretive. She was sixteen now and there was no sign of that changing. Still, Abby knew that puberty was like the rising and falling tide: first you drifted out, then you came back in. And if she didn’t, Lori could at least make a very successful CEO someday. Either that or a prolific serial killer.

  ‘I think it’s good you aren’t just happy to settle, Dad,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks, hun,’ Ray said.

  ‘She was looking at me when she said settle,’ Abby said. ‘I’m not the only one who saw that, right?’

  Lori folded her arms across her chest and said, ‘I just don’t understand why you need to go out of your way to make him feel like an idiot.’

  ‘I don’t understand why you need to go out of your way to act like an arse,’ Abby said.

  ‘It’s not that far out of her way,’ Eddie offered.

  ‘Ding, ding, ding,’ Ray said. ‘Round one over. Fighters return to your corners.’

  Lori tugged a Post-it Note down from the fridge and handed it to Ray. ‘Eileen Betchkie called for you. She didn’t say why but she took a long time saying it. I couldn’t get her off the phone.’

  ‘Eileen?’ Abby said. ‘Weren’t you working on her property today?’

  Ray nodded. ‘I probably missed a blade of grass and she wants me to come back and fix it. I’ll call her back tomorrow.’

  Island Care was primarily a caretaking business, focused on maintaining unoccupied holiday houses across the island, but while Ray was always busy in the colder months, he still never earned enough to keep them going once the tourists returned. To help make ends meet, he took yard maintenance and lawn-mowing work where he could find it. He hated working for locals. Abby would have thought it easier to work for people you knew, but Ray found it quietly humiliating. Still, they weren’t in a position to turn it down.

  ‘She’s probably just lonely,’ Abby said.

  ‘Or she has a crush on Dad,’ Lori suggested.

  ‘Sadly, I think you’re both right,’ Ray said.

  He sat down at the table and stared at an intimidating stack of bills, as if looking hard enough might change the due dates. ‘Any chance of you picking up an extra shift at the Buy & Bye?’ he asked Abby.

  ‘At this time of year, it’s unlikely,’ she said. Then, seeing the concern in Ray’s eyes, added, ‘But I can ask. But we’ll be okay, right?’

  ‘Always,’ he said. ‘If there’s one thing this family knows, it’s how to survive.’

  3

  THE WIDOW

  ‘John Paul Getty the Third was the grandson of an American oil tycoon,’ Fisher Keddie said, marching back and forth across the brightly lit interview room, somewhere on the second floor of the Brighton Police Station. ‘He was abducted in 1973, and when his grandfather refused to pay the ransom, his kidnappers sent him John Paul’s ear in the mail. His ear.’

  John’s father had insisted on meeting Kate at the police station. He was a short, bulky man, with receding hair and a pair of glasses that looked too small for his face. His eyes, usually deep and thoughtful, looked crazed.

  ‘Then there’s Walter Kwok,’ he went on. ‘Frank Sinatra Junior, the list goes on and on. All sons of wealthy men, taken in an effort to extort their family’s wealth. That’s what this is. It has to be.’

  The officer taking their report waited patiently for Fisher to stop ranting. He was a big man who had apparently missed a small patch of black whiskers on his morning shave. They poked out from a tuft on his left cheek, and Kate found it hard not to stare. He’d given his name, but Kate hadn’t caught it, and the nametag on his breast pocket was too faded to read.

  ‘Does John have any identifiable scars or tattoos?’ the officer asked, when there was room in the conversation to ask it.

  ‘I feel like you’re not listening to me,’ Fisher said. ‘This family is worth a lot of money. We should be, I don’t know, tapping phones, preparing for the ransom call. And yes, he has a jagged scar on his left forearm from where he came off a swing when he was nine.’

  ‘That’s not right,’ Kate said. ‘He had a plastic surgeon fix it before our wedding. He hated that scar. I liked it, but he hated it. He said it looked like a baked bean.’

  The officer two-finger-typed the answer into his computer, then read the next question off the monitor. ‘Any medical conditions that may affect his vulnerability?’

  ‘No,’ said Kate.

  ‘Does John take any prescription medication?’

  ‘Can you imagine if it was a woman that had gone missing?’ Fisher asked, joining them at the desk. ‘You’d have helicopters out and sniffer dogs and you’d be going door to door.’

  ‘Does he have a history of drug or alcohol dependency?

  ‘No,’ Kate said.

  ‘Has your husband ever expressed suicidal ideations?’ he asked, in a tone dryer than unbuttered toast.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Fisher said. ‘No, of course not. John’s a normal guy. He’s happy.’

  I wonder if that’s true, Kate thought. It was starting to feel less like they were talking about her husband, and more about a stranger. Filing a missing person report, she was quickly learning, was not unlike applying for a loan or sitting for a job interview: there were dozens of questions and each one made her feel more ignorant and naive.

  ‘What do you do, Mrs Keddie?’ the officer asked.

  Kate hated that question. ‘I’m a stay-at-home mother.’

  ‘You have kids?’

  ‘A daughter. Mia. She’s ten. It didn’t feel right to send her to school so she’s with her grandmother.’

  The officer noticed a speck of muck on his space bar and gave it a polish with a well-licked finger. ‘Does your husband enjoy being a doctor?’

  ‘A physician,’ Fisher corrected. ‘And yes, he does. He enjoys it very much.’

  ‘Still, working in palliative care must take a toll. My wife and I had to put my father-in-law in a place like that last year. We couldn’t afford Trinity, but I imagine they’re all pretty much the same. Death is everywhere, hanging over everything. Must be a pretty depressing place to spend your nine-to-five. Is that why John quit?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kate admitted, trying to keep the sound of heavy resignation from her voice. ‘He didn’t tell me.’

  ‘He didn’t tell you why he left?’

  ‘He didn’t tell her he had left,’ Fisher said. ‘Any of us, I mean. We only found out yesterday.’

  ‘He kept it from you both?’ the officer asked. ‘Why do you think he’d do that?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ Kate said. ‘I wish I did.’

  The officer leaned back in his chair. ‘Tell me about this medical conference.’

  ‘It’s a ten-day palliative care research colloquium. Trinity sends someone every year. It moves around. Last year it was in San Francisco, the year before that was Sweden, I think. John didn’t want to go but someone dropped out at the last minute and his hands were tied.’

  ‘How last minute?’

  ‘He found out a few days before he left.’

  ‘But you have reason to believe he didn’t attend the conference.’

  ‘I called the hotel where the conference was held. John was supposed to have a room there, but there was no trace of him on their records. I contacted the airline. The flight details he gave me were correct, but he never got on a plane. So far as I can tell, he didn’t even buy a ticket.’

  ‘Do you have any idea where your husband might have been for the past two weeks?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  The bigger question was where had John been for the past three months? Nausea swept through her system. Her body
felt off balance; some parts were numb, others were aching. Her chest was tight. She fluctuated wildly between feeling scared for her husband and feeling furious at him, between wondering where he was, and where he had been.

  If he wasn’t going off to work each day in the fresh shirts Kate had ironed and left out for him, where was he going? How was he spending his days? Who was he with?

  ‘Have you had contact with your husband since he left?’ the officer asked.

  ‘We talked every other day over Skype.’

  ‘And it seemed like he was calling from London?’

  ‘It looked like he was calling from a hotel room. It wasn’t as if Big Ben was in the background, but I had no reason not to believe it was London.’

  ‘When you talked to him, did he give you any indication something was wrong?’

  If we don’t talk about the monsters in this world, John’s voice whispered, we won’t be ready for them when they jump out from under the bed.

  ‘He looked homesick,’ Kate said. ‘He missed us. He said he was ready for his trip to be over.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Like what?’

  The officer shrugged, far too casually. ‘Did he seem strange? Off? Was there anything unusual about his behaviour? Stuff a wife would notice.’

  Fisher scoffed and rose with an exaggerated sigh. He went to the window. He closed his eyes tightly against a dusty sunbeam, shaking his head.

  The officer watched him for a moment. ‘Is there something you want to add, Mr Keddie?’

  ‘Kate isn’t the type of…’ He trailed off, waved a dismissive hand. ‘Forget it, it’s nothing.’

  ‘The type of what?’ Kate asked.

  He looked at her, then lowered his eyes to his feet. ‘You’re not the type of wife who notices, Kate. If he were being coerced or threatened in any way, he might have given you a, I don’t know, a secret signal or something.’